The most depressing part of the release of the CIA torture report on Tuesday was not the revelations about waterboarding, sexual threats or other brutality committed by agents at so-called black sites around the world with the complicity of our own and other governments.

For years, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news organizations have documented the existence of "extraordinary rendition" — a euphemism for state-sanctioned kidnapping of terrorism suspects who were held indefinitely without charge — as well as the widespread use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" — i.e., torture.

What is most depressing about the report — or as it's known in Senate parlance, the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program — is how little time it took before the scoring of political points.

"We have no doubt that the CIA's detention program saved lives and played a vital role in weakening al-Qaeda while the Program was in operation," said a joint rebuttal by 6 of the 7 GOP committee members.

Even as Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was still speaking on the Senate floor, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted that, “those who served us in aftermath of 9/11 deserve our thanks not one sided partisan Senate report that now places American lives in danger.” In advance of Tuesday, Republicans had already described its release as "unconscionable.”

It wasn’t unconscionable. It was enlightening. And what should be the takeaway — beyond bipartisan bickering — is that when the United States is revealed to have made secret use of the same brutal methods it publicly abhors, it makes it too easy for countries such as Russia to label America a hypocrite nation. It feeds the PR machine of militant groups such as the Islamic State. It is not the report but the torture program itself that has aided those who want to recruit Western fighters for Islamic Jihad.

Beyond public diplomacy fallout, the torture program undermines what military personnel are trying to accomplish in the Middle East, Afghanistan and parts of Africa. In most of these places, these are fights over values, and supposedly we’re fighting against both radical groups and state-sanctioned brutality.

We are not on the side of the torturers.

A country founded on the sacrosanct notion of individual rights that comes to condone the uses of torture (which ultimately treats the individual not as an individual but as a means to an end) undermines its own moral standing in the world — and that is not some abstract philosophical point but a strategic and geopolitical consideration.

It is not the release of the report that puts Americans at risk — it’s the use of torture in the first place.

In advance of the report’s release, Human Rights Watch published a detailed breakdown of times when the U.S. government condemned foreign torture tactics used similarly by its own agents. For example, in 2000, 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government called for Iran to end “suspension for long periods in contorted positions,” which Washington deemed to be torture. However, as HRW pointed out, and as has now been confirmed, "stress positions were among a number of interrogation and detention techniques authorized for use by the Bush administration."

The full report is still classified, but what the 500-page executive summary did was fill in the often grim and hard-to-read details of those techniques. Consider, for example, subjecting someone to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, or a phrase like “rectal feeding,” which makes you wonder about the kind of depraved creativity that some CIA agents in the field evidently displayed.

As the Times reported: “Conditions at one prison, described by a clandestine officer as a ‘dungeon,’ were blamed for the death of a detainee, and the harsh techniques were described as leading to ‘psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.’”

The report also reopened a discussion about the usefulness of torture. Experts mostly agree torture is basically useless in extracting actionable intelligence, since who wouldn’t confess to anything or even invent things under duress? Torture, the report said, was "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees." It did not get us Osama bin Laden. It did not achieve anything beyond the pain it inflicted.

As President Barack Obama said in a statement on Tuesday, the report reinforced his "long-held view” that “these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests."

The use of torture ultimately affects our global standing in the world, and the true import of the torture report is that it reminds us that we can only defeat the nihilistic tyranny of the Islamic State and other radical groups through the superior force of our ideas and values.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.